SEO
Why your restaurant isn't in the Maps pack
Ristorante Online · 7 min read
When someone searches “Italian restaurant” plus the name of your neighbourhood, Google first shows a map with exactly three restaurants. Almost every guest picks one of those three. Everything below is the second division.
Google decides on three things
Proximity, prominence and completeness. You can't change proximity — your restaurant is where it is. You can change the other two, and that's almost always the difference between you and the neighbour ranking above you.
Completeness is the easiest win
A profile with a category, description, menu, holiday hours, booking link and twenty recent photos rises above a profile with a name and a phone number — without a euro of advertising. Most restaurants we see never filled in half of it.
Prominence here means reviews
Not just the average, but the volume and the freshness. Ten reviews from last month weigh more than sixty from 2019. So with every restaurant we start with a simple system: a QR card with the bill, one sentence from the waiter, and every review answered — including the bad ones, especially the bad ones.
And the website?
The website is the proof. Google checks whether the profile belongs to a real, maintained site: same address, same hours, a real menu, fast on a phone. When those don't match, the profile stays down — no matter how good the food is.